The American education system is poised to be a battleground for funding, diversity and immigration issues under President Trump.
On his campaign trail, Trump has mentioned ending the U.S. Department of Education; rolling back federal funding of public schools, particularly those maintaining diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies; supporting vouchers allowing parents, even wealthy ones, to receive taxpayer money to send their kids to private schools; and overturning Title IX, a law prohibiting sex-based discrimination which was expanded under Biden to include sexual orientation- and gender-based discrimination.
In late November, Trump picked Linda McMahon to be the next Department of Education (ED) secretary; McMahon, a major Republican donor, is also co-chair of his presidential transition team; former Small Business Administration head under his first term; and founder, former president and former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).
K-12 and higher education
“We can expect lots of resistance if Trump tries to proceed with plans to dismantle the Department of Education, and it will come from unlikely quarters, including other Republicans in Congress and the Senate,” said Pedro Noguera, dean of the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education. “Eliminating the department won’t eliminate public education, but it would jeopardize oversight.”
About 90% of general K-12 public education is state- and local government-funded, with 10% — about $800 billion in 2021 — coming from the federal government.
“There’s more federal funding at stake in compensatory cases, like special education and schools in impoverished areas,” he explained. “Many of these kids are from Republican families and areas, and cutbacks to that support are going to get pushback.”
Title I, a grant program established in 1965 for disadvantaged schools, commits the federal government to fund 40% of per-pupil special education costs, although actual funding has always remained below 20%, and was less than 13% in 2023.
Schools with at least 40 percent of students from low-income families are also eligible for Title I. In 2022, these and similar Title I funds for impoverished schools accounted for $15.6 billion; about 63% of public schools in the country’s over 13,000 districts were eligible.
In his first and upcoming administration, Trump has also supported private school choice proposals including tax credit vouchers, a measure overwhelmingly rejected in 2018 by voters in states including Arizona, Nebraska, Kentucky and Colorado.
However, backing from wealthy conservatives has led nearly a dozen states to create or expand private school voucher or savings programs in recent years.
Despite resistance to policies like these, often from their own voter base, “a lot of what is driving the administration right now is ideology aimed at launching and sustaining culture wars, like attacks on transgender students and DEI … without bridging the educational gaps our students face,” said Nogura.
According to ED data, 54% of Americans between ages 16 and 74 read below a sixth grade level.
“Our demographics are changing to include more students traditionally left out of our nation’s education priorities, and I don’t see the incoming administration’s policies doing better by them,” said Thomas Toch, director of the FutureEd program at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
Higher education policies supported by Trump include taxing endowments, nearly half of which are held by 22 out of nearly 6,000 U.S. colleges and universities; reducing oversight of for-profit institutions like the unaccredited Trump University, which ceased in 2010 after several lawsuits; reducing federal Pell Grants and work-study programs like AmeriCorps; and ending loan forgiveness and DEI initiatives created under President Biden.
Toch added that “International students are also at risk, given the administration’s promises to limit legal and illegal immigration into the US,” particularly given Trump’s pick of first-term immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller as the White House deputy chief of staff for policy.
Legal challenges
Legal precedents present major barriers to other Trump-supported policies, like immigration status-dependent public school attendance and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) rollbacks, said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Plyler v. Doe, the 1982 Supreme Court decision guaranteeing every child the right to attend free K-12 public school, “is not in any imminent danger at all,” he explained. “I know we’ve seen a court majority that has overturned long-standing precedent for reproductive choice and affirmative action, but both cases were results of decades-long overturning campaigns by the right, which is not the case with Plyler.”
The Plyler decision, which has been incorporated into federal statutory law, would also prevent raids by ICE or individual immigration officers on public K-12 school campuses.
When the Supreme Court overturned Trump’s attempt to eliminate DACA in 2020, it did not have the six-to-three Republican-appointed majority it currently does.
However, eliminating DACA would be more difficult in Trump’s second term than the first attempt, which was done through an announcement by the Attorney General to change an Obama-era policy.
In 2022, the Biden administration strengthened DACA through a formal regulatory rule-making process. This means that eliminating DACA would require an extensive process involving a public proposal in the Federal Register with public comment and government response periods.
“Many of the anti-discrimination protections and civil rights we count on in education are even more protected by legislation which would require action from a Congress that, despite formal Republican control, is quite evenly split in the House of Representatives, where it would be difficult to enact anything without unanimous Republican support,” Saenz said.
“What we will get is a daily barrage of rhetoric that is anti-immigrant, anti-DEI, anti-civil rights and anti-public education, including overstated powers of the President to do what he wants,” he continued. “It’s a calculated campaign to convince local decision makers, including school district officials, to withdraw on their own from these issues … But that rhetoric can’t be made real in most cases without congressional action.”
“My biggest concern is that rhetoric still has repercussions. People get scared by it, even if it’s not followed up by action. We certainly saw that under the first Trump administration,” he added. “We need to do the best we can to prepare for that rhetoric, and remember that the President and his cabinet members do not have dictatorial power. They still have to follow due process for the major changes they’d like to see.”
